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Parti Québécois’ defeat is crushing

This election was the Parti Québécois’s to lose from the start. Now their fall is complete.

Parti Québécois Leader Pauline Marois blows a kiss to supporters after announcing her resignation on election night Monday. Her party suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Liberals.
(Ryan Remiorz / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

MONTREAL––This election was the Parti Québécois’ to lose from the start. Now their fall is complete. And their defeat is crushing.

Pauline Marois, the 65-year-old career Péquiste with long-held dreams of ushering Quebec into new life as an independent country, will leave the premier’s office after just 18 months, announcing her resignation as PQ leader in the face of a Liberal majority and the loss of her own seat.

“You understand that it’s not without a certain emotion that I address you tonight,” said Marois in her concession speech before 500 cheering supporters in downtown Montreal.

“The defeat of our party tonight saddens me just as much as you, perhaps even more.”

The Liberals won 70 of the legislature's 125 seats, compared with 30 for the PQ. The Coalition Avenir Québec took 22 seats and Québec Solidaire finished with an additional seat for a total of three.

As the picture of the loss sharpened, the mood dimmed at the party’s election night headquarters in a Westin hotel ballroom. Voters had rejected the PQ platform en masse, not charmed by the promise to ban religious symbols in the public sector and turned off by the shadow of a third referendum lingering on the horizon of a sovereigntist win.

Beneath lights casting a Quebec-blue ambience into the crowd, the PQ faithful stood with arms crossed and long faces, some with tears welling in their eyes.

In her speech, Marois promised a smooth transition to new leadership, and declared her enduring wish to see a more independent Quebec that protects the French language.

“Whatever our political allegiances, we have the duty to brandish the flame of the Quebec language and hold it high,” she said.

“We have everything to gain by taking all our decisions ourselves.”

The Liberal victory Monday night seemed more and more likely in the waning days of the campaign. At the same time, the PQ’s bid to cling to power appeared desperate and disorganized at times.

During a speech at the Montreal Board of Trade last week, Marois dangled surprise tax cuts just days before Quebecers went to the polls, and even conceded Saturday she had been willing to speak about sovereignty on the campaign trail.

But the decline of the PQ was by no means inevitable. At the outset of the race, when Marois dissolved the national assembly on March 5, her team appeared to have a clear shot at a majority.

Throughout the campaign, she spoke constantly about the people she’d brought into the PQ fold, such as former student union leader Martine Desjardins, who joined another former protester of the 2012 Maple Spring, Léo Bureau-Blouin, as the recognizable faces of the party’s youth cohort.

Both Bureau-Blouin and Desjardins lost, while other prominent PQ members who were unseated included Yves François-Blanchet, the development and environment minister, Immigration and Culture Minister Diane De Courcy and Health Minister Réjean Hébert.

Then there was Marois’s “best economic team in Quebec history,” a phrase she trotted out at every opportunity on the campaign. This included, of course, Pierre Karl Péladeau, the Quebecor media baron whose entry as a PQ candidate on March 9 is seen as a pivotal moment for the party’s fortunes on the campaign trail, launching the PQ’s sovereignty agenda front and centre with his declaration to “make Quebec a country.”

Liberal Leader Philippe Couillard ran with it for the rest of the contest, insisting the election had become a “clear choice” between the identity politics and referendum goals of the PQ, versus his promised stability and focus on the economy, jobs, education and health care.

Marois, especially in the early days of the campaign, fuelled speculation that there was the shadow of a referendum on the horizon by openly musing about borders and currency in an independent Quebec.

As the campaign dragged on and polls started suggesting the Liberals were pulling away from the PQ, Marois worked to convince voters that Couillard couldn’t be trusted to protect the French language. She repeatedly charged that the Liberals would take Quebec “back 50 years” by institutionalizing bilingualism and diminishing the presence of French in Quebec.

Facing four years of a return to the opposition benches after a relatively brief time in government, PQ members who defended their seats vowed to press on and work to defeat the Liberals in the next election.

“We will get back up after this defeat tonight,” said Bernard Drainville, the minister responsible for the PQ’s controversial secularism charter, at the election night rally.

“Our love for Quebec will never die, never. And the project that we carry is a beautiful project. It’s a project of liberty ... We will never abandon it.”

Péladeau, a possible heir to the PQ leadership whose full-throated support of sovereignty had Marois backpedalling on the referendum question for much of the referendum, also took to the podium.

“We will defend the interests of Quebecers, and of the country they deserve,” he proclaimed.

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